Polio has been painted as some natural scourge of humanity. Yet, epidemics and outbreaks of polio in Europe go back to only less than 100 years. Outbreaks of polio after 1950 were demonstrably caused by intensified diphtheria and whooping cough vaccination, tonsillectomies, other injections (painkillers) and a variety of traumas. There is now evidence that polio paralysis has also been a very common yet discreetly hidden side effect associated with polio vaccines.

When the first, injectable, polio vaccine was tested on 1.8 million American children, within a few days they had a huge epidemic of paralytic polio: in the vaccinated, their parents and other contacts.

They called it the Cutter incident and claimed that some of the vaccines (produced by the Cutter Laboratories) contained live polio virus. So, the company withdrew their vaccines despite polio vaccines produced by other manufacturers also causing paralysis in this outbreak.

Although the vaccines are officially causing paralysis, allegedly only 10-12 reported cases per year in the USA. The word 'reported' is the key word here. With the mass use of the polio vaccines and continuing occurence of polio in the vaccinated, the necessity arose to redefine the disease polio. The classical definition of polio is a disease with residual paralysis which resolves within 2 months (usually within days). The new definition of polio now is 'a disease with residual paralysis persisting for more than 60 days.' This is the secret formula of 'eradication' of polio. Children are still getting polio, but those cases which resolve within 60 days (which represent some 90% of cases) are not diagnosed as polio. A new disease emerged: viral meningitis and as the incidence of polio plummeted, so did the incidence of viral meningitis sky rocketed.

The best (and perhaps most frightening) example of these "elegant administrative moves" is how they allegedly eliminated polio in the Americas (meaning South America). The Journal of Infectious Diseases published in 1991 the results of a major vaccination drive between 1985 and 1989 to eliminate polio. Within 4 months they had a huge outbreak of paralytic polio (350 cases). They decided to reformulate the vaccine. Now if this outbreak had occurred in the unvaccinated they would not have had to reformulate the vaccine. The outbreak occured in the vaccinated.

However, the outbreaks with ever increasing number of reported cases of 'flaccid paralysis' in the vaccinated continued. So what did they do? They started discarding most of the reported cases of flaccid paralysis. Out of 2094 reported cases they only 'confirmed' 130, the rest (1964) were discarded. They published a graph which shows ever increasing number of reported cases as shadowy columns in the background and the ever decreasing numbers of confirmed cases as black columns in the forefront. I praise them for publishing it this way: any discerning and unbrainwashed reader can see very clearly what happened in the Americas between 1985 - 1989: mass vaccination caused sustained outbreaks of paralytic polio and they tried to camouflage it by discarding the vast majority of cases. When they finally stopped the program in 1989, even the number of reported cases (shown as those shadowy columns in the background) went down.

The same happened in other countries: huge epidemics of paralysis followed mass-vaccination drives.

Acute Flaccid Paralysis is a term which applies to the exact clinical symptoms you would expect to see from poliovirus infection, but which are not necessarily caused by polioviruses. Paralytic polio is actually considered a sub-category in the broad umbrella of acute flaccid paralysis. See pages 300-312 on the Oxford Journals website for a chart and summary of many other causes of AFP, a few of which are: Guillaine-Barre syndrome, Cytomegalovirus polyradiculomyelopathy, Acute transverse myelitis, Lyme borreliosis, nonpolio enterovirus and Toxic myopathies.

For many years the medical profession assumed that when they saw paralysis with a particular cluster of symptoms, it was poliomyelitis. The 1954 Francis Trials of the Salk vaccine triggered a reconsideration of this assumption, and a major change in the diagnostic criteria.

The 1954 “polio” data includes all paralysis. While some of this may have been from polio, in reality, much of it was from other causes. With the change of diagnostic criteria in 1955 that reduced case numbers, followed by laboratory testing that excluded vast numbers of other causes, the 1961 data only includes the small subgroup of paralysis caused by poliomyelitis. This is then compared with the catch-all 1954 definition. Because it was impossible to know what proportion of 1954 data were really caused by poliomyelitis viruses, the 1954 data was left as it was, and nothing of the back story is revealed to the readers. When people say: “we know the polio vaccine saved us from huge epidemics of this devastating disease” they are basing their knowledge on misinformation.

The numbers used in the worldwide program to eradicate polio were estimates using very loose standards that hypothesized the number of cases, and extrapolated them across large areas before vaccination campaigns were ignited. This was followed by much stricter diagnostic standards that weeded out Acute Flaccid Paralysis from other causes.

As the number of cases subjected to laboratory analysis rose, and the number of cases of polio dropped, the number of cases of acute flaccid paralysis rose.

The Polio Global Eradication Initiative (PGEI), founded in 1988 by the World Health Organization, Rotary International, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, holds up India as a prime example of its success at eradicating polio, stating on its website (Jan. 11 2012) that "India has made unprecedented progress against polio in the last two years and on 13 January, 2012, India will reach a major milestone - a 12-month period without any case of polio being recorded."

This report, however, is highly misleading, as an estimated 100-180 Indian children are diagnosed with vaccine-associated polio paralysis (VAPP) each year. In fact, the clinical presentation of the disease, including paralysis, caused by VAPP is indistinguishable from that caused by wild polioviruses, making the PGEI's pronouncements all the more suspect.

According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative's own statistics2 there were 42 cases of wild-type polio (WPV) reported in India in 2010, indicating that vaccine-induced cases of polio paralysis (100-180 annually) outnumber wild-type cases by a factor of 3-4. Even if we put aside the important question of whether or not the PGEI is accurately differentiating between wild and vaccine-associated polio cases in their statistics, we still must ask ourselves: should not the real-world effects of immunization, both good and bad, be included in PGEI's measurement of success? For the dozens of Indian children who develop vaccine-induced paralysis every year, the PGEI's recent declaration of India as nearing "polio free" status, is not only disingenuous, but could be considered an attempt to minimize their obvious liability in having transformed polio from a natural disease vector into a manmade (iatrogenic) one.

Polio underscores the need for a change in the way we look at so-called "vaccine preventable" diseases as a whole. In most people with a healthy immune system, a poliovirus infection does not even generate symptoms. Only rarely does the infection produce minor symptoms, e.g. sore throat, fever, gastrointestinal disturbances, and influenza-like illness. In only 3% of infections does virus gain entry to the central nervous system, and then, in only 1-5 in 1000 cases does the infection progress to paralytic disease.

Due to the fact that polio spreads through the fecal-oral route (i.e. the virus is transmitted from the stool of an infected person to the mouth of another person through a contaminated object, e.g. utensil) focusing on hygiene, sanitation and proper nutrition (to support innate immunity) is a logical way to prevent transmission in the first place, as well as reducing morbidity associated with an infection when it does occur.